Introducing Sky for Mac.
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Sky floats over whatever you’re doing so you can:
- Ask questions from anywhere on your Mac
- Take action in your apps (send a message, schedule an event, etc)
- Use your own custom tools by adding prompts, scripts, shortcuts, or MCPs
For the past two weeks, I’ve been able to use Sky, the new app from the people behind Shortcuts who left Apple two years ago. As soon as I saw a demo, I felt the same way I did about Editorial, Workflow, and Shortcuts: I knew Sky was going to fundamentally change how I think about my macOS workflow and the role of automation in my everyday tasks.
Only this time, because of AI and LLMs, Sky is more intuitive than all those apps and requires a different approach, as I will explain in this exclusive preview story ahead of a full review of the app later this year.
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Sky is an AI-powered assistant that can perform actions and answer questions for any window and any app open on your Mac. On the surface, it may look like any other launcher or LLM with a desktop app: you press a hotkey, and a tiny floating UI comes up.
[…]
What sets Sky apart from anything I’ve tried or seen on macOS to date is that it uses LLMs to understand which windows are open on your Mac, what’s inside them, and what actions you can perform based on those apps’ contents.
Pressing ⌘⌘ to grab your current context is a delightfully natural interaction.
Sky saves the current window or file as well as its metadata, so you can ask AI about it right away.
[…]
To go further, you can add Custom Tools – which can include custom instructions, MCPs, AppleScripts, & shell scripts – and yes, Shortcuts!
You can extend Sky’s capabilities however you want – and designing them is easy with prompting built right into the editor interface.
This feels like the so-far-unfulfilled promise of Apple Intelligence — but more. The ways I want to automate iOS are limited. But the kinds of things I want help with on my Mac are boundless.
As with Grammarly, it’s amazing that they seem to be doing more than what Apple promised, yet without requiring the apps to rearchitect everything around intents.
The Apple Intelligence team meeting after seeing Sky, after very publicly failing to ship their own version of this stuff.
The real question is why couldn’t the founders of Shortcuts build this stuff at Apple, and what were the systemic failures that pushed them out to go it alone.
This week on @appstories, I share my first impressions of Sky and we share our wishes for Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence.
Previously:
